The Origin of Language

Archeological evidence, although it enables us to set an approximate date for the beginnings of language, offers no evidence from which we can reconstruct its evolutionary development. We must approach this problem by comparing human language as a whole with the communicative systems of the animals, and primarily with the systems known to exist among the apes.

The communicatory systems of 1he modern apes, and probably also of the early hominoids, are in essence closed repertories of calls. Man's language, on the other hand, is an open system, a system that is capable of producing an almost infinite number of utterances, some learned but many others formed on patterns common to the speech community rather than learned. Indeed, man's language enables him both to produce and to understand utterances that are completely novel, that have never been spoken or heard before, This property of language, its productivity, is apparently lacking in the call systems of the animals.

A second property of language, also absent from all call systems, is displacement, Displacement refers to man's ability to talk about things and events that are remote in time or space. It is the faculty of displaced speech that enables man to recount events in his past and events that took place long before he was born; to talk about things and events he hopes to achieve in the future; and to create, in myth and fiction, beings, things, and events, natural or supernatural, that have never existed and. perhaps never can exist, Displaced speech, it is evident, also gives a continuity to physical experience, and so enables man, alone among the animals, to work out his problems in the absence of the physical situations in which these problems arise.

The utterances of a language consists wholly of a sequence of elementary signaling units - distinctive sounds, or phonemes, Phonemes have no meanings in themselves but serve only to keep meaningful utterances apart, as when the utterance I hit him is clearly distinguished from I bit him simply by changing the first phoneme of hit and bit. Language also has a structure in terms of morphemes, minimum meaningful elements, such that a pair of utterances like, he walks along and he walked along are distinguished by the contrast between walk and walked; more specifically by the fact that the morpheme written -s and marking the present tense appears in the first utterance, whereas the morpheme written –ed and marking the past tense occurs in the second utterance.

This design feature of language, whereby morphemes are differentiated by varying combinations of phonemes, is called duality of patterning. It is duality of patterning that makes it possible for a language to possess several thousands of morphemes, even though the number of distinctive signaling units, or phonemes, is rarely more than fifty. In a call system, each call differs as a whole from the rest, both in total sound effect and in meaning.

The fourth distinctive property of language, traditional transmission, refers to the fact that language is taught and learned; it is not, as appears to be the case with call systems, transmitted by the genes. Human children have no language at birth - they acquire one by hearing and rehearsing utterances made by adults and" later, by inferring from the utterances they hear the meanings of the morphemes and, more importantly, the processes by which phonemes and morphemes are built into complete utterances. Once they have acquired these processes, the children build their own, often quite novel utterances, ones they have neither heard nor rehearsed.

Why English?

That English is the language of international communication par excellence (for example it greatly outdistances its nearest competitor as the language in which most scientific papers are written) cannot be denied. Nor, as a reflection of this fact, can it be denied that in countries where English is not the mother tongue it is the world's most commonly taught foreign language. One other language, Chinese, has more native speakers, but they are largely restricted to a particular geographical area, and Chinese exhibits less standardisation in its spoken forms than does English. That English occupies a dominant position, however, does not necessarily mean that it will always be so.

The reasons for the spread of English are well known, from its position in Shakespeare's day when it was the mother tongue of a few million people living on an island off the north-west coast of Europe, to its present position where many peoples other than the native English can claim it as their own. The industrial revolution happened first in England; in their search for raw materials and markets and partly because of Victorian notions of national destiny, vast territories in all parts of the world were 'acquired' by the British. The language followed economic and political dominance. Even as British influence declined, that of the United States, to which the language had been carried in its colonial period by those emigrating from Britain, increased. The British Empire is dead and, to say the least of it, many countries are revising their notions about the propriety of American hegemony, but the language remains. In countries where the original inhabitants were mostly killed or were reduced in numbers by disease or the total disruption of their patterns of life and cultural self-sufficiency, like the United States itself or Australia, English became the language of all immigrants who occupied aboriginal lands; in countries such as India or Nigeria where the native cultures for one reason or another were better able to resist Western technological shock and eventually secure independence, English was and may still remain the language of government and administration, the law courts and particularly High Courts, education and particularly Higher education, commerce and banking and other prestigious and in the context of the modern state essential activities. In countries where other colonial powers ruled, like Spain and Portugal in Latin America, English is the principal foreign language.

The main difference between now and the days of Empire is that most countries can work out their own language policies rather than have policies imposed on them. In this context, one must say that English has no intrinsic superiority over any other language. It

is one of the tenets of linguistics that one can do anything with any language given enough time. All languages are capable of equivalent development. Had the industrial revolution happened first in India and the colonising process taken place in the reverse direction I might now be writing a book about Hindi as a foreign language.

Language is value-free in relation to potential performance; a language spoken by only a few hundred people in let us say a remote valley in the highlands of New Guinea could be put to all manner of uses. It is I think necessary to say this because it is not uncommon to hear people, teachers included, making naive and false judgements about 'civilised' and 'primitive' languages, when what they really mean are languages spoken by people who happen to live in technological or non-technological cultures. Only a few thousand years ago, a relatively short period in terms of human history on the planet, the lineal ancestor of English was also only spoken by a few hundred skin-clad people who were at the time probably wandering in a desultory fashion in a vaguely westerly direction along the edges of some Central European swamp. Of course, problems of intrinsic merit are not the only ones that need to be considered. Although nothing of significance has happened to the English people genetically, a lot has happened to the English language, in relation to the ways it is used and what it is used for, that has not happened to all other languages. Again, the question of whether or not the English language should be used should not be confused with the past merits or beastliness of the British. It is not very rational to reject English chauvinistically just because it is the language of a former colonial power, if it had a certain place and certain resources invested in it in the country concerned. There may, I admit, be other more valid reasons for rejecting it.

Where English is concerned I suggest that some of the determinants of a linguistic policy should be these. If it is already spoken in a particular country, who speaks it, and for what purposes? Is the country monoglot, with one mother tongue, or polyglot? If the latter, is English used as a lingua franca in communication between different language groups'? If it is thought fit to replace it for this purpose, is it best replaced by another lingua franca or by one of the native languages? If the latter, what will be the reactions of people from other language groups? .The reactions of those who feel themselves linguistically disadvantaged can be very forceful indeed, in Europe as much as anywhere else. Many Welsh speakers feel strongly about the inferior position, as they see it, of Welsh compared with English in Wales. French and Flemish speakers in Belgium have been known to riot for or against one or the other language.

If English is to be replaced or partly supplanted, what effects will this have on the educational system? Are there textbooks in other languages? Is it economic to translate everything for each language group? If a country's needs for English have been adequately assessed, needs such as those of science and technology, airline pilots, diplomacy, tourism to and from the main centres of the English speaking world, how far down the education system does one start and with how many and what kind of people? What is an acceptable wastage rate? That is to say, how many people begin to learn the language who never become users of it, in any meaningful sense?

The question of teacher supply and training has to be considered, for English and all other subjects, as has the question of teacher quality. If, at secondary level, a high proportion of teachers have no real command of the language at that level or perhaps to continue it for reasons of nominal equality? Will English be taught in all schools or only in some? If in only some, what criteria of selection will be used; fee-paying, nearness to the capital or to libraries, intelligence of pupils, however defined, or what? Will English be the medium of instruction, and if so at what level will it begin to be so? If it is the medium of instruction will its introduction be gradual, subject by subject, or total at a certain defined level?

Some, though not all, of these topics will be touched upon in this book, for it is not my intention to write a treatise on educational planning in respect of English. The list is not exhaustive - I have not mentioned the kinds of skill which the English syllabus is supposed to teach - but one would expect policy-makers to be asking the kind of question above and framing solutions related to the needs of their particular countries as they see them. Certainly no independent country should rely on expatriates to provide its answers for it. Their role is only to give advice if asked, and otherwise to fulfill in a professional fashion the terms of whatever contract has brought them there. They have no enduring stake in English in another country, however it has manifested itself. Probably the worst thing that any country can do is blindly to adopt in full a foreign syllabus. These are usually metropolitan in character, but have normally developed over a long period of time to suit particular sets of social conditions; transplanted to foreign soil they quickly become cancerous growths, using up the resources of the body politic and returning nothing. 

(Brian Harrison: English as a Second and Foreign Language, Edward Arnold).